Bittersweet Fruit
by notintoit
Summary: "There are Satanists in your orange grove!" Amy blurted out.
1. Chapter 1

Amy Pond stood in the doorway, and infinity stretched out before her. A control console and a man, not even much of a man, a slender thing with almost-sentient hair and a tweed jacket. He looked at her from beneath wispy brows, cheeks tight, hands by his sides, fingers trembling ever-so-slightly, like they would rather be tweaking a knob or running lightly down a lever like a lover's leg than staying so annoyingly still.

He didn't say anything. Neither did she. A draft blew in from behind her, but she didn't turn to look. She knew what was there. A smell came with it, and she breathed it in. She let it horrify her.

Finally, he broke his silence and his gaze. "Oh, close the door," he muttered as his eyes dropped to the TARDIS console. He pushed a couple of buttons half-heartedly and reached out to a lever, but didn't pull it, just let his hand rest there. "There wasn't a good outcome," he said to it.

Amy reached behind her and pushed the blue police box door shut. "There was a less bad outcome," she said, voice betraying nothing, but she stormed past him (he glanced up briefly, trying to catch her eye, but she gazed determinedly ahead) and deeper into the TARDIS.

He was alone in the control room. It was quiet.

It was very quiet, and the Doctor hated quiet. He could hear himself think, and this was not a time to be thinking. This was a time to be pulling down the nearest lever with his right hand and flipping the time altimeter over there with his left and then pulling on this bit over _here_ and grabbing onto the lurch-handle as the TARDIS lurched into the time vortex and grated away into an uneasy future.

* * *

It wasn't supposed to end up this way.

Rarely was it; the Doctor had vowed long ago to never again utter the words "What could go wrong" as nothing seemed like more of a glad invitation. Still, though, he always seemed to find himself in the midst of… well, something going wrong.

"If you get into a fight with one person, maybe they're the problem, but if you get into a fight with the whole universe, maybe you're the problem," Amy had told him once, looking down her chin at him as she leaned against the control console. If his surprise at the audacity of the statement had caused his elbow to twitch and accidentally brush against the gyroscopic stabilizer, making the TARDIS bump over the 1780s and rudely dislodge Amy from her oh-so-comfortable perch, well, who could blame him?

But today, nothing was going to go wrong.

Amy had been doing research on her ancestry. It was a recent interest. Now that she had access to an actual time machine, her old dead relatives didn't seem so old and dead anymore.

"Great-great-great-aunt Freya," she told the Doctor, and thrust a grainy sepia-toned picture of a round-faced lady in a bulky black dress into his face. She was gazing haughtily at the camera from a terrace overlooking scattered palm trees and a mountain range. "On my dad's side. She lived in California."

The Doctor raised an eyebrow. "The US of A, eh?" He grinned in delight at his own intentional wordplay and started dashing around the TARDIS console, pulling knobs and flipping switches as the room blared into life around them.

"She was born in Scotland, sister to my great-great, well, you know," shouted Amy over the dinging and screeching. "When she turned twenty, she moved by herself overseas. She's sort of blacklisted in my family for that, and then everyone lost track of her. Something about how it's hard to communicate around the world without Wi-Fi."

"1910s America!" shouted the Doctor as the TARDIS set, aimed, and ferociously womped its way through time.

* * *

Amy Pond stood in the doorway, squinting out into the impossibly bright sky, wearing a faded yellow t-shirt that said "Good Vibes" and depicted a smiling sun paradoxically wearing sunglasses. Amy was also wearing sunglasses. The Doctor wasn't sure what Good Vibes were, or why the shirt seemed to portray a living star - in his (thankfully) limited experiences, they were never quite so smiley - but Amy had always had, er, interesting wardrobe choices.

"It's a beautiful day," she called back over her shoulder. The Doctor checked the screens - Southern California, March, 1911, perfect, he was so good at this - and joined her at the door. The sky was deep and clear, the mountains quiet and huge, and they had landed in what seemed to be an infinite orange grove. The Doctor let his eyes drink in the colors, blue, brown, green, orange, infraorange, ultraorange, and even his favorite, Quite orange.

Amy stepped out of the TARDIS and into the heat of the day. Smiling serenely, the Doctor followed her. The first step of an adventure! Everything fresh and full of potential, millions of different potential time tracks branching off and spiraling out, eddying and twirling into nothing as reality was incrementally determined with each passing microsecond. Here they were, the Doctor and Amy Pond, masters of their own destiny, authors of their own timeline.

The Doctor gradually became aware of something and stopped. "Oh!"

A few tree-lengths ahead of him, Amy stopped as well and turned. It sounded like he had stepped on something, a nail or maybe a really big cockroach. "What?"

"It's _hot_ ," the Doctor said, incredulously, as if he'd never experienced the sensation of Hot before.

"Six seconds out of the TARDIS before you found something to whine about," said Amy. "A new record."

"Like, _really hot_."

"It's California, and you're wearing _tweed_."

"How do you people _live_?"

"By not wearing tweed blazers in a desert, I suppose. Take it off if it's so bad." _Take it all off!_ volunteered 19-year-old Amy inside her head, jumping up and down, and Current Amy allowed it.

She turned on her heel and continued down the line of orange trees towards the mountains. The Doctor gave the sun a dirty look, tugged at his bow tie until it loosened, and, dragging his feet, followed in Amy's wake.

* * *

By the time they reached the road, the Doctor was drenched in sweat, his blazer hooked on a finger and thrown over his back, his hair a collection of drooping seaweed. Amy, not one red lock out of place nor drop of sweat visible on her clothes, glided up to him, glowing healthily. She flipped her sunglasses up to rest on top of her head and eyed him up and down. Her choice not to comment was, in itself, a comment.

"I don't suppose you know exactly where in this orange forest my aunt is?" she asked the Doctor sweetly.

"It's an orange grove, and no," he said, wiping his hair off his forehead. "May I remind you that you showed me a picture, that's what I had to navigate with, so," he mopped sweat off the back of his neck and flicked the moisture to the ground, "I like to think I'm doing a _pretty good job_ overall."

It was really marvelous, Amy's ability to condemn with a look. The master of the unsaid. The Doctor knew mimes who would kill for the ability, and had.

"Technically," she said, "we have no idea if she's here or not. We haven't seen her." The sun beat down. Did a bead of sweat dare mar her fair brow? Surely not. "We haven't seen anyone. Actually." _Good Vibes_ , said her shirt.

The Doctor opened his mouth for a witty retort, then closed it again and tilted his head, rotating his entire body on a heel so that the bowl of his ear was at the optimal angle for the faint breeze to carry information to him from afar. Amy watched him closely, almost ravenously. Adventure was starting. This was how it always started.

He waggled his eyebrows at her. The game was afoot. He motioned with his head, _this way_ , and they crept off, away from the road and back into the trees. They were more like bushes, really, squat and thick, and they must have been planted long ago, Amy thought, noting their size and density. And the deeper they got, they more she could hear what the Doctor's weird alien ears had been able to pick up so long before hers - rhythmic chanting, low and steady, many voices joined in one.

And there was the source, figures glimpsed through thick growth. Instinctively, both the Doctor and Amy hovered behind branches to observe. At least twelve of them, humans, or at least human-shaped, clad in black from head to foot and surrounding a tree. The Doctor was sweating just looking at them, not that he hadn't already been sweating.

And… interesting. The chant wasn't being translated into anything the Doctor could understand. That was rare. There were only a few cases in which it was even possible for that to happen.

The chanting reached an apex, the figures threw their arms in the air in concert, and a tall circle of fire erupted into existence around the tree. Amy gasped at the Doctor's elbow and took an involuntary half-step step back; the Doctor leaned forward, eyes wide, and accidentally knocked not one, not two, but three oranges off their cover tree while doing so. The oranges thudded to the ground. One bounced and found a groove in the grass and dirt that it rolled down until it gently bumped into the foot of the nearest figure, who turned, look down, saw the orange, then looked up straight at Amy and the Doctor, face still sheathed in shadow. It took a threatening step towards them.

"Ah, run," the Doctor suggested, then followed his own advice without waiting for a democratic vote, turning on his heel, grabbing Amy's hand, and taking off down an orange-tree-lined lane.


	2. Chapter 2

The Doctor had no idea if the black-clad figures had actually been chasing them, but between their untranslatable language and seeing them summon fire out of apparently nothing, he didn't want to take any chances before he had more information. Then was the time for chances, _then_ you might as well call him the chance _machine,_ but you'd never find him just running into something blind—

The universe took this opportunity to have had an orange seed find the ground, many years ago, just feet ahead of the Doctor's contemporary position. Over time, the seed had grown into a sprout, the sprout into a sapling, the sapling into a tree, and the tree into a beautiful specimen, blessed with many orange-laden branches, one of which had grown to precisely the height of the average Time Lord's forehead. The Doctor obligingly bounced his off of it in the present and ended up on his back, blinking up, flight derailed. An orange fell on his face with a smack. He groaned, more in offense than pain.

"Come on, Doctor," Amy said as she swept into his field of vision, increasing the redness of the scene by at least half, and sounding vaguely scolding, like he had just chosen to lie down and waste time, like he was _really having fun_ doing it. "I think we lost them." She helped him up, brushing an orange leaf out of his hair (the leaf itself was green, but it came from an ora- oh, never mind), then glanced back in the direction from which they had come. The Doctor looked too. All clear, nothing but dense green and orange as far as the eye could see. The Doctor was getting a bit sick of Quite orange, to be honest.

This time, the noise they heard was close enough for them both to hear it at the same time. And it was unmistakeable—the cocking of a shotgun was the nearest thing to a universal language the Doctor knew of, next to math and running. They turned around. Amy's round-faced Great-Etc-Aunt Freya, no longer in sepia but living color, stood two feet behind the barrel of the gun, making aggressive eye contact with the pair. The gun's eye contact was equally as aggressive. "Who are you and why are you in my oranges?"

This was not the first time the Doctor had been asked this question. He was as speechless now as he had been then.

Behind him, Amy cleared her throat. "We were, ah, just passing through, and-"

The shotgun barrel lowered as she spoke. Freya stared. "Are you _Scottish?"_ she interrupted.

The Doctor and Amy froze. They really, _really_ should have considered this. Freya and Amy looked dissimilar enough to not be instantly recognizable as family, but what were the odds of running into another Scot and a Brit (well, a Brit-presenting alien) in California in 1911? The Doctor ran through potential explanations in his mind. Salesmen! No, that was ridiculous, why was that always the first thing he thought of; military! No, definitely not; private investigators, checking in on her welfare on behalf of the Scotland Ponds! There, that was decent, he opened his mouth-

"There are Satanists in your orange grove!" Amy blurted out.

Now all three of them were speechless. The Doctor wondered if it was too late to just go back to the TARDIS and leave. The sun beat down mercilessly and he was sweating for no other reasons at all.

"Are they… still there?" said Freya.

"Ah," interrupted the Doctor before Amy could answer, keeping a wary eye on the shotgun and thinking of fire bursting forth from nothing, "no, they bogged right off, would have thought they caught their own robes on fire-"

"Fire?" Freya said sharply. She glanced up at the sky; no traces of smoke anywhere.

"Did I say fire? I meant, no fire!" said the Doctor. "Well, a small fire anyway, and they seemed to have had it pretty well under control…"

"Show me where," said Freya. She lifted the shotgun in a relatively non-threatening way, gesturing between the Doctor and Amy. "And then we're going to talk."

* * *

There was no sign of the Satanists when they finally found the right place, to nobody's surprise; it wasn't like there were a lot of unique markers and it was hard to backtrack when one had fled in a panic, so they had had a good head start.

What there was instead was a crisp, charred ring in the grass, surrounding the tree that had been at their center. The tree itself had some singed leaves but was mostly unharmed. Mostly, except, something was wrong with the oranges.

Freya was the one to notice, of course; Amy and the Doctor were mere orange laymen, lay-woman-and-alien, if it was round and the color it said on the tin everything was fine as far as they were concerned, but they would defer to a real live orange wrangler. "They're rotted," she said, shotgun held slack and pointed downward in one hand, the other carefully touching a still-on-the-branch fruit. She put her fingers around it and pulled, but the orange's rind collapsed into itself and all she had was a handful of green-black pulp. "Uchh." She wiped her hand on the leg of her denim dress. She sampled a few from around the tree, all with the same result.

The Doctor, who had been struggling to unpeel an orange he had snagged off a nearby tree during the walk but finally succeeded just as Freya made her discovery, dropped it like it was a hot potato, rather than a tainted citrus. Amy gave him a deadpan stare from across the clearing, hitching an eyebrow up one significant millimeter.

"This rot. I've seen it before in my fields," said Freya, who was crouching down to examine the mealy remains of the fruit on the ground surrounding the tree. She stood and turned to face the Doctor and Amy. The barrel of the gun finally lowered all the way. "You had better come inside," she said. She turned, and Amy and the Doctor exchanged a glance. "Mind," Freya said over her shoulder, "I still might shoot you in there. But it sounds like we have something to talk about."

* * *

"To be fair, we don't know for sure if they were _actual_ Satanists," said the Doctor, who was cradling a piping hot cup of tea in a surprisingly cozy bungalow-style house down three lanes of trees and half a mile from where they had been in the grove. "All we know is they were wearing dark robes, chanting in some droning, atonal language, and summoning forth fire in some kind of arcane ritual." He sipped. "Plus, the definition of 'actual Satanist' is a little tricky and has a more obscure answer than you would think."

Freya's and Amy's teas were both untouched from where Freya had set them down when they had entered the house in tense cordiality minutes earlier. This didn't concern the Doctor too much; tense cordiality was a very Pond thing to be good at. What did concern the Doctor was the continuing presence of the shotgun, although it was currently tucked away behind the door.

Freya saw his nervous glance and, in a very non-reassuring tone of voice, said, "You might want to consider making some sense soon, love. Might start to think you were hiding under one of those robes."

At this, Amy laughed, genuinely, then looked as surprised as anyone. "Sorry," she said. "It's just, look at him."

They did, while the Doctor tried to look both brave and cool and succeeded at neither.

"He's damp enough just from existing in the heat," said Amy. "Imagine if he had spent even five minutes wearing a head-to-toe black robe out there. He'd be drenched."

Freya laughed too, an echo of Amy's. "Well, you're not wrong," she admitted.

The Doctor pushed aside his tea. "So, interestingly, you don't trust us, but you do believe us when we say there was a group of robed men engaging in some kind of shamanistic—"

"Just call them Satanists, Doctor, it's quicker," interrupted Amy.

"When we say there were Satanists in your oranges," he revised. "Which means that you've seen them before. What have you seen, Freya?"

She crossed her arms and leaned back in her chair. "I'll tell you what I've seen."

The Doctor and Amy shared the briefest of unearned satisfied glances.

Freya said, "After you tell me how you know my name, how you got here, and who you are. Or that pretty blue box you came in? It's going to be the next thing that goes up in flames."


End file.
